The Reading List has a headache this week, because for almost a month now it has been attempting to plough through the Big Novel of 1996, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Test. The book runs more than 1,000 pages and is virtually impossible to decipher — it seems to be about a school in Massachusetts filled with tennis players who do a lot of drugs. Only it isn’t Massachusetts, because Massachusetts has been taken over by Quebec. There’s a movie that hypnotizes everyone who watches it, and an addict who goes into drug treatment. The Reading List usually hates this kind of Pynchonesque overwriting, but Wallace is an undeniably brilliant writer — so brilliant that it is difficult to put the thing down, even though holding it up in bed is enough to cause wrist dislocation. More reports as The Reading List nears the conclusion.
But Infinite Test does bring to mind some great, brilliant, immensely long novels that only a maniac (or a reviewer) can actually finish:
Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Doblin. The elaborate, Joycean account of an ex-con making his way through late-1920s Berlin, made into an unwatchable 13-hour movie by the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died soon after. And who could blame him?
The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil.
Much discussed last year because of a new edition, this unfinished 2,000- page novel about — well, it’s a little hard to say what it’s about, exactly. An international conference, a lot of people, some amazing satirical set pieces, but incomprehensible.
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce. People have been arguing about it for years. Why, The Reading List doesn’t know, since the List has figured out the truth about Joyce’s final work: It only looks like it’s in English. Actually, it’s transliterated Swahili.
